Is there a name for this insidious corollary to Apple's "walled garden"? If not, the Macalope thinks "enslavement surprise" has a nice ring to it.

In a normal world, writing favorably about Apple would just be common sense, as the company is doing pretty well. In this world it makes you a "fanboy."

The Macalope normally wouldn't care about this, but twice in the last week he's seen the same shorthand of lazy punditry applied to TechCrunch's MG Siegler, and he thought it was odd. It's like that old joke where the woman goes the psychiatrist and says "Doctor! My husband is a pervert!" and the psychiatrist says "That's ridiculous! It's absurd! He can't be!" The woman says "How do you know?" To which the psychiatrist replies, "Because I'm one! And he's never at any of the meetings!"

Just like any slur, it means the writer has turned his brain off and is just phoning this one in. When Siegler , Bott called it When Siegler suggested Google's purchase of Motorola Mobile had left Mountain View with its various parts dangling in the wind in terms of patents, Dan Lyons